More Thoughts (and now math!) On What Came Before the Big Bang

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Physicist Sean Carroll gave a wonderful talk at the June 2008 American Astronomical Society meeting about his “speculative research” on what possibly could have existed before The Big Bang. (Here’s an article about Carroll’s talk.) But now Carroll and some colleagues have done a bit more than just speculate about what might have come before the beginning of our Universe. Carroll, along with Caltech professor Marc Kamionkowski and graduate student Adrienne Erickcek have created a mathematical model to explain an anomaly in the early universe, and it also may shed light on what existed before the Big Bang. “It’s no longer completely crazy to ask what happened before the Big Bang,” said Kamionkowski.
Inflation theory, first proposed in 1980, states that space expanded exponentially in the instant following the Big Bang. “Inflation starts the universe with a blank slate,” Erickcek describes. The problem with inflation, however, is that it predicts the universe began uniformly.

But measurements from Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) show that the fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) –the electromagnetic radiation that permeated the universe 400,000 years after the Big Bang — are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than on the other.

WMAP map of the CMB. Credit: WMAP team
“It’s a certified anomaly,” Kamionkowski remarks. “But since inflation seems to do so well with everything else, it seems premature to discard the theory.” Instead, the team worked with the theory in their math addressing the asymmetry, since one explanation for this “heavy-on-one-side universe” would be if these fluctuations represented a structure left over from something that produced our universe.

They started by testing whether the value of a single energy field thought to have driven inflation, called the inflaton, was different on one side of the universe than the other. It didn’t work–they found that if they changed the mean value of the inflaton, then the mean temperature and amplitude of energy variations in space also changed. So they explored a second energy field, called the curvaton, which had been previously proposed to give rise to the fluctuations observed in the CMB. They introduced a perturbation to the curvaton field that turns out to affect only how temperature varies from point to point through space, while preserving its average value.

The new model predicts more cold than hot spots in the CMB, Kamionkowski says. Erickcek adds that this prediction will be tested by the Planck satellite, an international mission led by the European Space Agency with significant contributions from NASA, scheduled to launch in April 2009.

For Erickcek, the team’s findings hold the key to understanding more about inflation. “Inflation is a description of how the universe expanded,” she adds. “Its predictions have been verified, but what drove it and how long did it last? This is a way to look at what happened during inflation, which has a lot of blanks waiting to be filled in.”

But the perturbation that the researchers introduced may also offer the first glimpse at what came before the Big Bang, because it could be an imprint inherited from the time before inflation. “All of that stuff is hidden by a veil, observationally,” Kamionkowski says. “If our model holds up, we may have a chance to see beyond this veil.”

What came before the embryo? When the sperm fertilized the ovum, there was a BIG BANG! Then there was an exponential growth and decay of cells, expanding and dying, expanding and dying, expanding and dying.…seemingly without end! A Microcosm mirroring a macrocosm and both recapitulating themselves for an ultimate purpose.

But if this really does work, it would be fantastic, semi-proving something before.
Although, if it does, then it opens more questions..
Wait, more questions = good, well, not for my head, i have a headache.

I’d like to believe that I have a pretty o.k. grasp of quite a fair amount of physics. I need to have it – I make Computer Graphics and Special Effects for movies: modeling weather, forces, landscapes, machinery, etc…

I’d also like to believe that I can (just about barely) follow much of the “advanced stuff” cosmologists and quantum physicists talk about: parallel Universes, 10 or 11 dimensions, entanglement, non-local correlations, etc…

There are two things, though, which I absolutely cannot understand.
One of them is the concept of “BEFORE the Big Bang”. Where is my frame of reference? Wouldn’t it have to be somewhere outside spacetime? Do mathematics and experimental set-ups for calculating and observing BEFORE the beginning of space and time exist?
This article seems to suggest they do – albeit way beyond my understanding.
Ah, well, I guess on this subject I’m in the same boat with many other men and women… and Aspirin, thankfully, is quite cheap 😉

btw, the other cosmology topic I can’t follow is most of the “Electric Universe stuff” – which seems to be rapidly falling out of favour, anyway. It actually seems to contradict much of what I can easily relate to….

There is only one universe and it has always been from the beginning with distances and time in all four directions to infinity. The baby universe that we as scientist continue to discuss and ponder, estimated to be 13.7 billion light years old, and is probably just one of many. When our ability to observe further back in time has improved, which it does every year, we will bring forth many answers to questions currently proposed but unanswered. In the meantime, all the theories that are around and conceived give us insight into our thought processes increasing our understanding of the unknown, which is the reason we continue to develop and try to decipher the meanings of their concepts along with the mathematical equations and constants that evolve.

For all our religious forks, let me give you an alternative definition of God–All Unanswered Questions.

All of this leaves us where we currently are with respect to our understanding both from the scientific and religious point of view. Perhaps, in the future, an alien scientist will someday arrive and explain it all to us, if we have not figured it out by then or if we are still here.

Okay, at the risk of introducing some unrealistic analogies, I think the Carroll’s argument roughly goes as follows…

If the inflating universe was like a bubble, with uniform surface tension, then we can get non-round shapes because the air within the bubble is not uniform, but the shapes are all roundish and it tends towards being perfectly round as time progresses.

If the inflating universe was more like a sausage balloon, then you might get a much more uneven expansion. A sausage balloon gets large at one end, and the expansion runs to the other end. Now, as the universe is getting inflated much faster than we inflate a sausage balloon (or so we believe) then we are unlikely to see aneurysms spreading across the universe. Nevertheless, it seems likely that departures from a spherical shape will be sharper and longer lived.

The universe is not made of rubber, but we can ask how much energy it takes to make it a bit larger. Even if there are no obvious particles in it, the wavefunction of every particle will pass through it. There are all sorts of problems reconciling large, relativistic physics and microscopic quantum physics – photons get red-shifted – where does the other energy go? – and we haven’t got many answers yet. However, if we try and model the fabric of the universe then we might be able to model the forces involved. At the moment, it seems like the uniform comsological constant sort of expansions do not give us the ‘lumpiness’ we see, so people are factoring in some non-uniform stretchiness.

I don’t really see how this links to the time before the big bang. We know the universe is not symmetric – we would not exist if it were. We think that minute asymmetries at the Plank radius would grow into observable asymmetries after inflation. What actually caused the original asymmetry – whether there is some spontaneous breaking of symmetry or the universe was slightly asymmetric at time zero – is currently hidden to us. A theory that increases the stability of perturbations will allow us to trace those perturbations back a bit further, but it will also reduce the initial perturbation necessary to generate the asymmetry we detect. We know there was some asymmetry anyway, so nothing has changed much.

This is not to say Carroll’s musings are in any way wrong. We tend to describe the Big Bang as coming from a dimensionless point because that is a nice, symmetric assumption, and if a dimensionless point has perfect symmetry, then where did the asymmetry come from? This is a long way from getting a picture of life before the Big Bang, though.

In the time immediately following the big bang, the universe existed in a super dense state where the gravitational gradient across the baby universe would have been significant – time would have flowed far far slower, especially towards the centre of expansion. This is a fundamental consequence of GR.

The expansion might appear to us to suggest a period of rapid inflation – but is actually the effect of huge time dilation during the early expansion of the universe.

Rapid transient quantum fluctuations during this time have their effects greatly magnified in this massively stretched time, resulting in the localized bumpiness we see as galaxies.

Time dilation also allows for information to travel from one edge of the early universe to the other helping to explaining the smoothness across the universe.

I know there’s a lot of genius behind these theories, but it seems we’re inventing an aweful lot theoretical particles to match our observations. All we really need is one theoretical particle called a fixatron. Describe it however you need to in order to make your theory work.

Another noob question, if the Universe is a balloon, are the black holes a way out of the universe, just like a hole in a balloon? With all the black holes around, shouldn’t the universe be getting smaller?

Seriously..Actually I think baseball is probably one of the best analogies when it comes to the Universe. I think it all began at home(Big Bang) and it will stretch out for a while, then all return back to a point and start over again. Forever and ever. God’s such a show off.

Joe – You asked: “The questions i have are, who or what created the Big Bang, how can something exist from nothing?
When the universe is expanding where is all the Matter coming from?
There must be a higher power the ignited this thing, Sometimes I say God created the Big Bang, set everything in motion and by chance life evolved on this planet, then again who created God?”

As far as something coming into existence from nothing – in empty space particles of many types are constantly popping into existence from nothing. They mostly pop back into ‘nothing’, but not all, especially when in the vicinity of a black hole. Where do they come from? Quantum uncertainties meet passing wave function? Somebody’ll eventually figure it out. Till then, the weak-minded among us will attribute it to the unanswered questions department ( GOD ). Feel free to join them if you like, their collective ignorance gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Interesting, but of course highly speculative. Still it is great to see we are starting to address some of these questions seriously. If inflation can’t fully explain our observations, then it is not a final theory and that must be addressed. Good on ’em for having a crack.

# kenn hammer Says:
December 17th, 2008 at 8:47 am

Here comes a noob question. if the universe is a balloon. then whats on the outside of the balloon?

>>> That would be pure speculation, but physicists talk seriously about 4D spacetime being embedded in higher dimensional hyperspaces and whatnot. Look up M-theory or brane cosmology if you want to get tripped out.

# Joe Says:
December 17th, 2008 at 10:09 am

Another noob question, if the Universe is a balloon, are the black holes a way out of the universe, just like a hole in a balloon? With all the black holes around, shouldn’t the universe be getting smaller?

Joe.

>>> Black holes are kind of a way out of the universe, but since the proposition of Hawking radiation, they aren’t really because in theory black holes can then evaporate and return matter/energy back to the universe. As to whether information is destroyed in a black hole – that is an open question, but I digress.

Black holes don’t simply act like giant vacuum cleaners and suck everything in per se – the universe is not disappearing into them. At a distance, they behave no differently to any other massive object – they exert a gravitational influence on other massive objects, just as our sun does or any other object in the universe. It is only if you get real close and cross the event horizon that gravity ramps up massively and you are doomed…

“Till then, the weak-minded among us will attribute it to the unanswered questions department ( GOD ). Feel free to join them if you like, their collective ignorance gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.”

Bit harsh in tone their Marcus – Joe was simply speculating about a very open question, and finished it off with “but then again, who created God?” which obviously shows he’s mulling it over and not simply on here with some sort of arrogant agenda.

Being a scientist, I love the fact that I can look at any single person in the world and know that they are just as clueless as me when it comes to the question of what the ultimate truth or reality is – it is a great feeling knowing there is so much mystery left to uncover. That applies to you, me and everybody else on the planet.

So how do you know there isn’t a god? There’s no evidence either way, and to me your comment seems just as arrogant as those that come on here and spout the opposite view.

People can have their personal view – even scientists – and I don’t care what that is. However, if you’re going to bring science into the fray, the only reasonable position to take in relation to religion in my opinion is a kind of disinterested agnosticism.

The joys of trying to understand the works of God.
Note: human Good Orderly Direction is only part of the works of the Great Omnipotent Divine who created other logical orders and also loves everything far better than we do. Enjoy his/her bounty and our gift of asking how did that happen?

The principle factor not being discussed in this discussion is the fact that all mortal scientific observations are based on information that can eventually be received by at least one of the five senses inherent in human beings.

Personally, I believe our Universe sits in an infinite field of other universes called the Multiverse. And the Multiverse, in turn, sits upon the very fabric of our plane of reality. In the Multiverse, infinite universes inflate and some “Big Crunch”-ify themselves independently of one another, like stars do when they go supernova and collapse into neutron stars/black holes.

I also believe the reason we can’t detect these other universes is that there is an incredible amount of Dark Matter in between each universe, so much in fact that everything that hits the dark matter is deflected, kind of like how fog deflects headlights (although that could be because water is reflective… hmm…). Then again, I am torn between this and the theory of “The universes are so far apart that any energy/radio waves/X-rays etc. from these universes hasn’t made it to ours”. I think the latter makes more sense.

In that case, 13.7 billion years will count as only a minute when taken into context of how big this mythical Multiverse is. Also, it’s enough to give anybody a migraine when thinking of it for too long. I know it’s giving me one right now…

As a final note, we’re beginning to know how the Universe was created… but then, how was reality created!? *head explodes*

“Till then, the weak-minded among us will attribute it to the unanswered questions department ( GOD ). Feel free to join them if you like, their collective ignorance gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.”

Bit harsh in tone their Marcus – Joe was simply speculating about a very open question, and finished it off with “but then again, who created God?” which obviously shows he’s mulling it over and not simply on here with some sort of arrogant agenda.

Being a scientist, I love the fact that I can look at any single person in the world and know that they are just as clueless as me when it comes to the question of what the ultimate truth or reality is – it is a great feeling knowing there is so much mystery left to uncover. That applies to you, me and everybody else on the planet.

So how do you know there isn’t a god? There’s no evidence either way, and to me your comment seems just as arrogant as those that come on here and spout the opposite view.

People can have their personal view – even scientists – and I don’t care what that is. However, if you’re going to bring science into the fray, the only reasonable position to take in relation to religion in my opinion is a kind of disinterested agnosticism.”

Hmm . . . what may have existed before the big-bang? A guess might include an infinite void full of some unknown energy. Energy equals matter and matter equals energy. I read that somewhere. If this is true, isn’t it possible the ‘big-bang’ is simply energy, maybe dark energy, mysteriously morphing into matter in our finitely small part of an infinitely large void. A currently active morphing, I might add, on a scale we can’t yet detect. I seriously doubt that space, time, energy and matter ‘big-banged’ into existance in an instant. The big-bang’ defies logic.

To Patrick Lee, I think Einstein’s E=mc2 sez it all. Energy matter, matter energy. Based on cosmic observations, energy had to logically precede the creation of matter. This notion is logical. It is the classic ‘big-bang’ model of creation that I believe defies logic. Also, your reference to multiple universes might actually exist and be nothing more complex than an infinate void frothing with overlapping Hubble Spheres 27.4 billion light years in diameter. It appears to me that how the univierse mechanism works might be very simple.

That anything exists at all is something that can be contemplated but defies logic. If you think about what came before creation it will warp the mind to some degree!! Even multiple Universes does not give rise to an answer of what brought about “All That Is”!!

To Rusty Shackleford, You are correct, it would be nice if all the problems of the world could be solved. Unfortunately that will never happen. Also, you might be surprised at how many people recognize how special it truly is to be alive on planet earth. And the squabbling you refer to is simply the unconscious exercising of the wonderful gift of thought.

I am a ignorant simpleton who enjoys seeing the verbal squabbling over what is logical and what is speculative. Although it pains me greatly that with so many problems in the world that, how we got here, is even relevant… Wouldn’t it make sense to help rid the world of disease and poverty and then determine how the miracle of existence came to be? But I guess if we could help everyone, overpopulation would doom us all…

So here we are, miniscule beings on a pebble in a vacuum… What we all fail to realize is the true appreciation we should feel for even having the opportunity to wonder, dream, think, and conceive our ideas of what we are witnessing. Understand that, and everything else seems as minute as the atoms we are composed of…

The matter does not come from anywhere. e=mc^2 and the results of inelastic scattering experiments point to the fact that energy was converted into the matter we see.

The most fundamental particles are quarks and two of them (you can’t separate them) make up a meson. When a beam of electrons are fired into a meson, the exchange particles of the quarks, gluons, behave like rubber bands. They grow stronger as they expand. But when enough energy of a beam makes the gluon field snap, the energy is converted to another pair of quarks. This matches how a universe would start with just one meson and reproduce by inflation.

Science is not based upon finding eternal truth. Science is based upon fasification and seeks ideas that are less false. Scripture is not the only basis for religion. Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were both very religious persons. However, both felt that experimentation is the act of asking nature a question. When any of us puts water into a pot and adds enough heat it will boil no matter who does the experiment and no matter what language one speaks. Kepler reasoned that all experiments were the way in which humans communicated with superior beings. He felt that when there was a descrepency between scripture and experimental results, he would always side with those results from science for religious reasons. He saw too many believers of scripture bashing one another’s heads in to believe what was put in writing, something humans used to distort reality too often for their own selfish interests.

All the phenomens can be explained by one force and this force is the pressure. (Don´t forget the power of thought! You also can move yourself by the power of thought! Quite right. You get yourself to move with the help of the muscles . You so you send message of your brains to your muscles and you get yourself to move? What is power/force of this thought, which get you to move there where you want?).

We can describe by people what happens in the atomcores all the time. For example one thousand people can go to the space and curl up close to each other. Now we have made an energyconsentration of people that covers a certain spot of the space. We know that the biggest part of the atoms is empty space. Also between people there exists empty space that does not expand or curve.

Now these people can begin to straighten or in other words to open up and this way they push themselves away from each other. One can observe the hardest pressure in the middle of this human energyconsentration and people who locate in the middle must do an enormeous job so that they woun´t
flatten in the centre. These people in the centre sweat the most. This is excactly the same thing that happens without gravitation for example in the centre of the earth and in the centre of the sun.

The density of the human energyconsentration reduces and the people push themselves away from the centre of the human energyconsentration. Now for a little while we can observe a phenomen of gravitation without a drawing force (that actually does not exist) on the surface of the human energyconsentration.

In my opinion the space does not expand or curve. If it would expand, could you describe how does the space expand?

It is easy to describe how the energy all the time turns into a less dense energy in the atomcores, so I think that it is time to forget all about the magical expanding and curving of the space. You can also forget all the spare spacedimentions, the dark substance and the dark energy.

So the space does not expand or curve!

The atomcores expand and open up expanding electrons and expanding photons and they beam their expanding energy as waves away from themselves. This is how it goes!

When you look at the galaxy, you can understand that the energy inside the galaxy is denser than outside the galaxy. If you look at a star, you can understand that energy inside the star is denser than outside the star. This way you will know for sure that the energy inside the atomcore is denser than outside the atomcore. It is not difficult to understand that the energy inside the protons / neutrons is denser than outside of them and the energy inside the qvarks is denser than outside the qvarks and so on…

It it also easy to realize that outside the visible universe the is an area, where is really much more energy than the visible universe has all together and the energy some where out there is much denser than than it is in a visible universe. Still in that area far away from the visible universe there is no centre point where the energy would be denser than outside it.

That three-dimentionally expanding energyconsentration that bems energywaves with the nature of the galaxies, is formed also from separate three-dimentionally expanding energyconsentrations ect. And so the smaller separate energyconsentrations we talk about, the denser and denser the
energy is all the time.

So the atomcore does not have a centre point, where the energy would be denser than outside it. There is no centre point also at the universe, outside which the energy would be less denser.

Because the MOVEMENT takes place towards a less dense area, then the visible universe MOVES as an entity away from that one point that is really far away from the visible universe and where the energy is much denser than it is in a visible universe.

what sparked the big bang, what created this reality which sparked the big bang, etc……the questions will never be answered and will go on forever. We need to accept our ignorance, people. God does exist. science and religions are trying to find this being but it doesn’t want to be found. keep looking….LMAO.

Excerpt from “The Yoga of Physics” by Fritjof Capra, his keynote address at the Los Angels symposium on Physics and Metaphysics, on October 29, 1977 is given below for reference.

“What is the nature and origin of the universe? what is space? what is time? Throughout the ages men and women have been fascinated by these questions. Different approaches have been developed in different cultural contexts and at different times.”

“We shall look at modern Western science, on the one hand , and Eastern mysticism – particularly the tradition of Yoga – on the other. We shall see that they lead to very similar views of the world.”

“My field is Physics, a science which, in the 20th century, has led to a radical revision of many of our basic concepts of reality.”

“In the Yoga tradition it is said that there are many paths, all leading to spiritual knowledge and Self-Realization. I believe that modern physics, to some extent, can be such a path. Its view of the universe is in harmony with those of the great yogis and sages. In that sense, I’m going to talk of the Yoga of Physics.”

Many views on the Origin of Universe are available. Most popular view is that universe was born with a big-bang from a highgly dense energy point. But I have some different view on it. I think the universe was not born from a concentrated point or ball like structure but it has evolved from an infinite vast expanse of field of gravity. Philosophically or religously we may call it field of consciousness or spirituality.

A great flow of current of gravitation force descended down from this source and has created many regions of pure gravitation force below it. This was the creation for quite some time in the first phase of the creational process. In the second phase when the current of gravitation force further descended down then electromagnetic forces and matter (weak and strong nuclear forces)manifested and the entire universe of the second phase was completed with the admixture of all the forces viz., gravitatin force, electromagnetic forces, and matter (weak and strong nuclear forces. The completion of the whole cosmos in two phases was also hinted in one of the speeches of Prof. J.V.Narlikar some years back. When the process of creation of universe reverts back in Brahmand (universe created during second phase of creational process)the matter merges into electromagnetic force and then finally electromagnetic forces merge into gravitation force and nothing remains except field of gravity in a highly dense body (Black Hole. The process of reversal does not take place in the universe created during first phase of creation. The cycle of universe completes like this.

Many philosophical-scientific evidences and theologians views can be quoted in support of this assumption

When we talk cosmology can we please stop explaining our own fabrics by thinking of crypto-theorethical solutions starting with God, philosophy, 12 dimensions and other crap to explain a made up big bang, incredible dark matter or evil gravity waves. We reached a sad point where scientific progress stands still, for these counterproductive interferences have become a serious part of ‘fundamental’ physics.
Science is explaining phenomena by experiments and logic, that’s all there is to it. Concentrate at the donut, not at the hole.

if time began at the big bang then before this cause and event was non existant,. If this is true then man can never expect to even theorise on anything before the big bang as it is impossible to reason without causality. Perhaps before the beginning of the universe the event preceded the cause………No time?unchanging eternity? Oh, but it changed. I suppose we will always wonder why.

No, no he does not. If you want to believe there is a higher force at work in the universe, that’s fine and dandy. But to think that in the vastness of this universe this crap planet was created before anything else and then because of an insignificant spec named “Adam” ate an apple which brought a curse into all of the universe which allowed God to create death, degeneration, suffering, to think that there is a grand invisible human like creator that is always responsible for good happenings and the slaughter of evil but never bad things and the killing of innocent, and that he’s never wrong even when he is, he knows all even when he doesn’t, to think that even though God created non-frequent homosexual behaviors in the animal kingdom which would include the fully sentient beast we call Man (and Woman), meaning things like the immense pleasure one can experience in sexual play while the internal prostate of the male is stimulated (by another man or a woman) is a big oops on God’s bodily design & sexual guidelines, to think he gives a hoot if you take his name in vain, lie with a person of the same sex, don’t show up for worship on Sunday, kill a fellow human being for your own undesirable pleasure or for the glory of him, eat shellfish, get a handjob before marriage, steal a pack of gum while in line at the grocery store, understand and believe (belief with reason, not with faith) in the natural process of evolution, and all that jazz, to think all of that and so much more just so you can have a religion to cling to, just so you can preach the parts you like, just so you can follow the bits of the faith’s practices as you see fit and not as the religion itself commands, thereby perpetuating the lie that there is a Biblical God no matter what bigotry that brings or simpleton mentality it continues to support is the most egotistical, ignorant, hypocritical, self-righteous, willfully blind-eyed, socially degressive, undermining, and pretentious nonsense one can spout, ever.